Violet Moller the Map of Knowledge
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The Map of Knowledge is like this.
I found myself riveted.
I, and I think many of us in the public school system in the US, got basic world history in high school. This was usually a discrete set of historical moments that were never really connected for you in the classroom except to know that these things happened in chronological order, usually from some arbitrary oldest topic to some point closer to the present day. There was ancient Greece, Rome, the Crusades, the Dark Ages, Rome again and the rise of Christianity, the Renaissance, etc...
But what you didn't know and were never taught, was how these different historical subject areas were connected and what connected them and why they happened. I will bet few of us had any notion that, but for Islam and the Arab world, much of ancient Greek and Roman history might have been lost and the Renaissance in Europe may have been long delayed.
A very interesting book and well worth taking the time to read. Violet Moller did a huge amount of work for this as evidenced by the bibliography and she really opened my eyes to an area of history I knew little about.
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First of all, I was fully aware of the contribution to scholarship in the Arab world during the centuries of their short-lived dominance. I studied Arabic and the Muslim world for many years. Her exuberance to in
I was very disappointed in this as I was expecting a lot more and for it to be a lot more interesting. Instead, it reads like a Wikipedia page. The author bends over backwards to point out that the Muslim world was keeping the light on in the sciences during Christian Europe's Dark Ages.First of all, I was fully aware of the contribution to scholarship in the Arab world during the centuries of their short-lived dominance. I studied Arabic and the Muslim world for many years. Her exuberance to inform the ignorant of the Arab achievements at times seemed to be unnecessary cheerleading, or a lecture on political correctness. She points out again and again the lack of medical education in Europe during the centuries between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, but what did anyone, anywhere contribute to medical science in that era? Not much. It wasn't until the late years of the 19th century that any real progress was made in medicine.
She includes only a sentence or two to mark just when the light went out in the Muslim world around the middle of the 15th century. Sic transit Gloria mundi, as the Latins would say. The lights went out even earlier in Spain, well before the final Reconquest of 1492 in Granada. More and more religious Muslim sects ruled Al Andaluz who almost completely abandoned scholarship and learning.
She also makes a lot of hay over the supposed religious tolerance of the Muslims, something that has been repeated ad nauseam although it's a bit of a myth, or at least an exaggeration. Of course, they treated women as badly as anyone in history, so at least half of their subjects were political prisoners, at best, and few, if any were educated.
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Moller is strong on her discussion of the interplay between Arabic and Christian centres of learning and the complex relationships between the two. However given that this book combines Ancient and Medieval history with a history of ideas in just under 300 pages, it is very much an overview of the topic. This is not necessarily a criticism as it made for a very accessible and enjoyable read, but anyone with a reasonable grounding in history or Greek thought might find this book a little light on detail at times. Overall, I would recommend this book as an interesting, well-written introduction to the relationship between Ancient Greek, Christian and Arabic worlds, albeit one that could have used more in-depth analysis at times.
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Limiting the scope of Classical transmission to these men and not including, say, Aristotle, seems a bit odd (interesting trivia: Aristotle was the first person known to have a private collection of books). But I'm actually more disappointed in Moller's focus on telling the story of the transcription ef
Moller traces the history of Galen, Euclid, and Ptolemy as their ideas are first written down, then fostered in the Middle East, and re-introduced to Midevil Europe at the start of the Renissance.Limiting the scope of Classical transmission to these men and not including, say, Aristotle, seems a bit odd (interesting trivia: Aristotle was the first person known to have a private collection of books). But I'm actually more disappointed in Moller's focus on telling the story of the transcription efforts, instead of the intellectual history of how these authors' ideas transformed over time. So much of this book was focused on biographical details of glorified transcriptors who I'm never going to remember. This feels analagous to telling the history of CERN through the eyes of the database administrators. Isn't the story of Classical ideas being fostered under Islam before returning to the "West" already pretty well-socialized? If you have a whole book, why not delve into what Muslim scholars contributed to these ideas? If they didn't make material improvements, why not? We get a few hints at this with the Salerno chapter on medicine, and Moller spends a little bit of time on al-Razi and al-Khwarizmi, but not nearly enough for my taste.
As much as I disliked Foucault, at least he explained the content of the ideas he was documenting, and how they transformed over time. I was surprised to see references to books I've read: Frankopan's The Silk Road, Greenblatt's The Swerve.
There is an insteresting sub-thread on the history of cities. Venice was the most engaging of these (crazy trivia: 30 million annual visitors today, for only 54,000 inhabitants). I would have loved to have learned more about Toledo, Salerno, and Seville.
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This book provides the answer in form of a journey, telling us the stories of ind A very interesting book that answered a question that I now wonder why I never thought to ask it - what happened to all the science and philosophy of the ancient world during the thousand years of the Dark Ages, when in most of Europe, Christianity was more keen on banning and burning such "pagan thoughts"? How come so many of them were still available and alive in some form or other when the Renaissance came about?
This book provides the answer in form of a journey, telling us the stories of individuals who were significant for the upholding and thriving of knowledge in their respective times and places.
Most significantly, it clears up some false illusions and shows us how significant the Islamic world was for science in the middle ages, even though these authors have later often been neglected to be mentioned or have been Latinised. It also explains why this step may have been necessary to bring important knowledge, especially about medicine, into Christian Europe.
We hear the word algorithm all the time, but how many of us know about al-Khwarizmi whose name is the origin of the word "algorithm"?
In short, a very Enlightening book ...more
I enjoyed it and I want more. Amazing read. Interesting and entertaining. Multiple histories all clicked into one. Very dense and I am baffled by the way the author condenses so much in such a nice "story" of history. Towns, science, scholars, ideas and books ... On every level a superb book/read.
I enjoyed it and I want more. ...more
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publishers via NetGalley, for review consideration.
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The arrangement is geographic as much as anything, focusing on the cities that housed the scholars and libraries that transcribed, translated and curated these works that could so easily have been lost at any point during that millennium. The chain of preservation and dispersal runs from Alexandria through Baghdad, Cordoba, Toledo, Salerno, various locations in Sicily and finally Venice. Throughout, Moller introduces us to the enterprising and brilliant scholars who, in their drive to gather and preserve knowledge, made incredibly journeys to track down these works and keep them alive. She also gives great credit to the large role that Muslim scholarship played during a large part of this history and laments the general public's ignorance of it.
One of my favorite summaries of this great endeavor takes place near the end:
"Each of the cities we have visited in this book had its own particular topography and character, but they all shared the conditions that allowed scholarship to flourish: political stability, a regular supply of funding and of texts, a pool of talented , interested individuals and, most striking of all, an atmosphere of tolerance and inclusivity towards different nationalities and religions. This collaboration is one of the most important factors in the development of science. Without it, there would be no translation, no movement of knowledge across cultural boundaries and no opportunity to fuse ideas from on tradition with those from another."
(A bit of unplanned reading list synchronicity - one of the last chapters of this book mentions Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar who presided over the famous Bonfire of the Vanities. Turns out, the next book I'm reading, Lent by Jo Walton, features a fictionalized version of him as the main character. I love when that kind of thing happens...)
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How can that be, when the max height of the Sistine Chapel ceiling is only 68 feet?
I am of no particular religious faith, but as I continue, I begin to detect the anti-Christian bias so typical of today's Western historical writers. In her preface, Moller sets forth the idea that with the spread of Christianity came the inevitable anti-intellectual book b
Just started in. Second sentence contains a glaring mistake, "Michelangelo, lay on his back on a huge scaffold, hundreds of feet in the air..."How can that be, when the max height of the Sistine Chapel ceiling is only 68 feet?
I am of no particular religious faith, but as I continue, I begin to detect the anti-Christian bias so typical of today's Western historical writers. In her preface, Moller sets forth the idea that with the spread of Christianity came the inevitable anti-intellectual book burnings and temple smashings. Just read the jacket copy to get a sense of that point of view, which in one easy sentence connects the growth of shadow-casting Christianity with book burnings and the loss of the Alexandrian library. Meanwhile, brilliant Arab scholars rode in to save future Western civilization from an even longer dark age.
While I appreciate the author's on-trend efforts to redress the sin of the West's ignorance of Islamic history (yet failing to say how Arab scholars came to be in the catbird seat to begin with), her frequent and unsupported axe-grinding against the Christian Church shows a rather dim appreciation of her readers' intelligence. (Moller: I have a PhD in intellectual history and can easily manipulate you! Ha Ha!)
I love the idea of this book however, since the question of how the ancient books came down to us has always intrigued me. I just wish it had been written by someone more qualified.
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Moller makes a cogent argument for the massive contribution of the Muslim world to what we think of as "knowledge" today. Without them the we would be less advanced and less rational.
Admittedly it was difficult for me to keep in my small brain the train of individuals who protected through translation the texts of Galen, P
This is a very interesting and important story. It also reminds the reader that most of the ancient books we read today - Homer, the Bible, Plato - are revisions of revisions.Moller makes a cogent argument for the massive contribution of the Muslim world to what we think of as "knowledge" today. Without them the we would be less advanced and less rational.
Admittedly it was difficult for me to keep in my small brain the train of individuals who protected through translation the texts of Galen, Ptolemy and Euclid. More compelling was the story of the various communities and cultures that enabled the individuals to do their work. I am prompted to learn more about the history of cities like Bagdad and Cordoba after reading Moller. I am glad to be reminded that the common attributes of these communities included toleration for different religious faiths and a leadership that but value on facts, science, and learning.
A very good read.
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I'm going to compare this to and complete with
Sylvain Gouguenheim, "La gloire des Grecs : Sur certains apports culturels de byzance à l'europe romane (Xe-début du XIIIe siècle)" (2017)
and
Lucio Russo, "Notre culture scientifique : Le monde antique en héritage" (2020).
V. Moller does mention Byzantium a great deal (despite her disclaimer in the introduction that she left Constantinople out of the picture). However, there is more to be said about middle age Greece in connection with the story being told.
Along with continuing the jurney to
Steven Shapin, "A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England" (1994, the year of Karl Popper's death)
and
Maurice Finocchiaro"On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion and Culture in the Galileo Affair" (2019)
and back in time to
(coll.) "Ancient Science", vol. 1 of the Cambridge History of Science (2019)
and
Julien Devinant, "Les Trubles psychiques selon Galien : Étude d'un système de pensée" (2020).
Must read for students and academics.
The authorised historical narrative runs something like this: good Muslims save Greek learning from bad Christians until a clever German invents books and then the cat's out of the bag. It is certainly time to challenge this new orthodoxy, and books like Moller's may be the spur. Unlike most medievalists (apart from Terry Gilliam, perhaps) she is an enthusiast for her subject. With most writing on this period Tolerance was alive and well in the Middle Ages. Who knew? Well, Violet Moller for one.
The authorised historical narrative runs something like this: good Muslims save Greek learning from bad Christians until a clever German invents books and then the cat's out of the bag. It is certainly time to challenge this new orthodoxy, and books like Moller's may be the spur. Unlike most medievalists (apart from Terry Gilliam, perhaps) she is an enthusiast for her subject. With most writing on this period, one can admire the erudition but one often wonders what drew the author to their subject in the first place – which they seem to find a dull as, well, their own output. As well as an enthusiast Moller is also an evangelist, and her approach is attractively original. She follows two manuscripts and Galen's opera omnia (also with an understandable nod to Aristotle and Lucretius) as they are transmitted around two millennia and seven cities. Her references and bibliography suggest that the range of sources consulted wasn't vast. Also, there are some omissions. For example, it isn't possible to deal with the emergence of vernacular Italian without mentioning Dante. Nevertheless, her point is made in sufficient detail to be compelling. Christians, Muslims and, sometimes, Jews, using a Hindu numerical system, overcame their theological differences and collaborated to better understand their macro and microcosm, astrology to anatomy, with a shared language - of Greek or Arabic, Latin or Mathematics. This is an uplifting message in an age when, even for dim-witted politicians, cooperation rather than war seems to be our best shot at survival. (Though somewhat depressing to realise that we could have learned that lesson by 1500). ...more
This book is incredibly well researched, and written in an engaging and witty way. I was not only interested by the topic, but hooked by the narrative put forth
People think of the time between the Roman empire and the Renaissance as the "dark ages," with minimal scientific expansion, and with a lot of knowledge being "lost" before it was rediscovered. This book works against that pervasive myth, tracing several texts through seven cities to see how they were preserved before the printing press.This book is incredibly well researched, and written in an engaging and witty way. I was not only interested by the topic, but hooked by the narrative put forth by Moller. It is fascinating to see how we managed to maintain so much knowledge when it was so difficult to preserve, and the reader and scholar in me did end several of the chapters screaming when outside forces came in to burn whole libraries.
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After almost two months, I have completely lost the thread of what I was learning. I don't have the time or energy or frankly I guess the interest to start the book over. I would definitely consider trying it again in a few years.
After almost two months, I have completely lost the thread of what I was learning. I don't have the time or energy or frankly I guess the interest to start the book over. I would definitely consider trying it again in a few years.
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Whenever I read statistics like this, I feel I have to quote them and mourn a little: "In the late fifth century, a man called Stobaeus compiled a huge anthology of 1,430 poetry and prose quotations. Just 315 of them are from works that still exist—the rest are lost. Science fared a little better, but, still, important works like Galen's On Demonstration, Theophrastus' On Mines and Aristarchus' treatise on heliocentric theory (which might have changed the course of astronomy dramatically if it had survived) all slipped through the cracks of time" (preface).
And, as a collector, I put my head in my hands when reading the following from Córdoba in the 8th century: 'However, this wasn't good news for scholars—one complained that, when a book he had been seeking for months finally turned up in an auction, he found himself caught in a bidding war. The price went so high that he had to give up and lost the book; his disappointment turned to anger when the man who outbid him admitted that he had no idea what it was about, he was simply, "anxious to complete a library which I am forming, which will give me repute amongst the chiefs of the city." The age-old squabble between wealthy dilettantes and penniless scholars had reached al-Ándalus.' (ch. 4).
The problem of organized religion reared its heads many times in this book. One that particularly struck hard was: 'In 1492, the last Muslim stronghold, the beautiful city of Granada, fell to the Christians. The terms agreed were generous and enlightened: Spanish Muslims would be allowed to live in peace, practise their religion and follow their own customs. But these hopeful beginnings were soon buried under a wave of intolerance and persecution. There was no place for alien cultures or religions in the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella; they expelled thousands of Jews, they oppressed and exiled Muslims, and began the process of destroying 700 years of Muslim civilization. The culmination came in 1499, when the fanatical cleric Cardinal Ximénez de Cisneros arrived in Granada intent on converting the population and removing any vestiges of Islamic culture. He took the contents of the city's libraries and built an enormous bonfire in the main square of the city, burning somewhere in the region of two million books—a "cultural holocaust" based on the principle that, "to destroy the written word is to deprive a culture of its soul, and eventually of its identity." Proclamations followed which banned writing in Arabic and prohibited the ownership of Arabic books. Ximénez de Cisneros was so successful that, by 1609, only a tiny number of Arabic manuscripts existed in Spain. The Catholic victory was complete, "only the empty palaces and converted mosques remained as mute witnesses to the tragedy that had befallen the once flourishing Islamic civilization of Al Andalus' (ch. 4).
Moller notes the fall of scholarship in the Muslim world during the Renaissance era, partly due to the fracturing of the Arab world into separate political entities which diluted funds for research and opportunities to collaborate, partly due to loss of funds when the Age of Exploration opened up new routes to the East that didn't include the old Silk Road, partly due to the slow adoption of the printing press for the Arabic language, and also partly due to the increasing religious conservatism in the Muslim world. However, she writes 'But it is less easy to understand why the legacy of Islamic science has been largely forgotten in Europe. Given the remarkable contribution they made, scholars like al-Khwarizmi and al-Razi should be household names, like Leonardo da Vinci and Newton, but, even today, few people in the Western world have heard of them. How did this happen? Part of the blame must lie with the humanists, whose idolization of Greek science led them to disregard many scientists of the intervening period. Medieval translators were also guilty of "Latinizing" the books they translated and failing to credit the original Muslim authors. And, as Europe grew in wealth and power, and began to build empires, it gained the cultural upper hand, too. As a result, a narrative developed that marginalized Arabic learning and pushed it back into the past' (ch. 9).
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To communicate her story the author focuses on three works of science: the Elements on mathematics by Euclid, the Almagest on astronomy by Ptolemy, and several writings on medicine by Galen. The story also moves around the Mediterranean, starting in Alexandria, with its library
This is a nicely written history that looks at the time between years 500 and 1500, addressing how foundational scientific ideas from the Greeks were sustained and transmitted through time until the European Renaissance.To communicate her story the author focuses on three works of science: the Elements on mathematics by Euclid, the Almagest on astronomy by Ptolemy, and several writings on medicine by Galen. The story also moves around the Mediterranean, starting in Alexandria, with its library and the environment of scholarship for both Ptolemy and Galen; moving to Baghdad, Córdoba, Toledo, Salerno, Palermo, ending in Venice and the time of the printing press. In each of these locations the author gives a very nice summary of the history, culture and events of the time of emphasis. She also highlights the people who had their own thirst for knowledge (either in collecting scrolls and later books) on various subjects. She explains the great industry in transcribing as well as translation; with some of the translators/authors adding clarity and/or corrections to the work.
One of the lessons she closes her book on is the following:
Each of the cities we have visited in this book had its own particular topography and character, but they all shared the conditions that allowed scholarship to flourish: political stability, a regular suppose of funding and of texts, a pools of talented, interested individuals, and most striking of all, an atmosphere of tolerance and inclusivity towards different nationalities and religions. This collaboration is one of the most important factors in the development of science. Without it, there would be no translation, no movement of knowledge across cultural boundaries and no opportunity to fuse ideas from on tradition with those of another." (page 264)
These are ingredients that successful societies use to promote science.
In reading this book I learned about each of these cities, and the challenges that must have been placed on the people the author talks about. She points out that the work of the Muslim scientists and scholars, which was considerable, was almost wiped out when the later European simply failed to mention the sources or contributions to keeping knowledge alive. She also mentions that Europe embraced the new technology of the printing press, which played a key role in making books and their knowledge more readily available. But the Muslim world was skeptical of the machine, challenged by how to print with the Arabian script, and suffering (as had the Christian Europe in the middle ages) of the restrictive power of religion.
The book contains many images and pictures, illustrating the effort put into scribing and later into printing.
As with any story or history, the author focused on a specific question and on specific works of knowledge, in order to put into perspective the role of the cities and the cultures they represented. We do not learn much about what was happening in China, although we do learn that the Chinese had invented the printing press prior to the Europeans, and had also invented paper before the Europeans.
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"In Baghdad, Harun founded the Bayt al-Hikmah - House of Wisdom - to house these books and the scholars who worked on them. We know tantalizingly little about what it looked like, how it functioned or where it was, so any suggestions have to be based on descriptions of similar places, combined with a dose of conjecture and imagination. However, we do know that it contained a library - a room or rooms that housed many books that were collected and produced there - so there must have been places where the scribes copied out the manuscripts and where scholars worked on translations. There were probably a considerable number of staff employed to run it . . . Other centres of knowledge of the same period usually offered scholars somewhere to sleep and provided food, so there would have been rooms for eating and socializing..."
WOW, what prize-worthy insight and deductive reasoning: this early Arabian library prototype would have had rooms for eating! And rooms to store the books! Gasp. This is what I am talking about; half of the book reads like this. Ironically, Moller's "The Map of Knowledge" contains little knowledge about the ancient world for you to learn. This book is definitely the cheap knock-off version of Stephen Greenblatt's "The Swerve" which is much more informative and better written than this expensive Wikipedia page, as someone else wrote on GoodReads.
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But it's not perfect. Prof. Moller says her map
I very much enjoyed this history of the transmission of ideas. Violet Moller tracks the knowledge and trafficking of three key ancient books (from Euclid, Ptolomy & Galen) from the fall of Library of Alexandria to Venice in 15th Century (where the combination of the printing press and the Renaissance secured their continued circulation). Her book has lots of notes, shows signs of heavy research, and best of all - remains very readable. Recommended!But it's not perfect. Prof. Moller says her map of knowledge consists of a tale of 7 cities. Her book has a corresponding number of chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. Nothing is bad, but I found the chapters on Alexandria, Bagdad, Cordoba and Venice a lot more powerful and convincing than the chapters on Toledo, Salerno and Palermo. Part of that is that each of the first four really created cosmopolitan institutions that were interested in gaining, discussing and disseminating knowledge. The other three are really chapters about a couple of important people. Either influential translators or patrons who were primarily in the places the chapters are centered on.
Considering that i most appreciated the history of the cities in a specific circumstances & time periods I thought that three of the chapters were weaker than the others in the book.
Though i liked some parts of this better than others there was no where in my read where i stopped turning pages or thought about putting the book down. I think most people who like history will enjoy this book a lot.
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Violet Moller the Map of Knowledge
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